


mrs. evans' cookery book

by hupsoonheng



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cooking, Gen, Grief/Mourning, HP: EWE, Mother-Son Relationship, Recipes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 00:34:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16821580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hupsoonheng/pseuds/hupsoonheng
Summary: harry discovers his muggle grandmother's cookbook that was passed down to lily, and makes his mother's favorite pudding, despite an ingredients list that measures everything in the weight of eggs. two hours' cooking time is more than enough time to cry





	mrs. evans' cookery book

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't written an hp fic since i was 13 or so but i've been reading a good amount lately, and my own mother has been sending me her favorite recipes from beat up cookbooks ever since i moved recently, so i put both those things together and made myself cry a little bit in the process

The book wasn't considered one of the late Potter family's valuables, and as such it's been moldering away in the deeper recesses of vault 687. Maybe moldering is the wrong word—the goblins take pride in how the items inside their bank seem suspended in time, perfectly preserved as they were upon entering the vault. 

The book could have used a much earlier entry. You trace your fingers along its water-stained red cover, keeping away from touching the crumbling spine. Inside, on the book's first blank page, the name _Marion Evans_ has been written in a neat cursive, the aged graphite still shining under the lamplight of your kitchen. Below it, in a narrower hand, a second name: _Lily Potter._

You want to touch this book so much, as if you might pull the memories out of each page through your fingertips, like silver wisps into a Pensieve. You want to put the book down and never touch it again, keep the corrosive nature of your living body from despoiling it any further and leave it floating in a glass display for eternity, as important as any magical artifact. 

A middle ground. You turn the page with ginger fingers. 

The book is full of notes, most of them written in your Muggle grandmother's cursive. Baking times are adjusted. Ingredients are added or subtracted. Theories and questions to herself crowd the margins, as if she were a scientist on the verge of discovering the next great breakthrough. 

Sometimes recipes are outlined with vigorous pencil strokes, marked with comments like _Lily loves this_ and _Petunia's favorite!_ You swallow around the strange feeling that lurks halfway down your chest, considering that your Aunt Petunia may have ever been a child with favorite dishes cooked by her mother. Pages marked this way are always the crinkliest, the wavy edges and brown splotches evidence of a steam-filled kitchen long ago. 

Sometimes the recipes are truncated, considering they're all stacked on top of each other, three rows to a page. They'll begin by referencing the recipe just before it, or two pages past, and you have to leaf through, only to be redirected again for an even baser recipe. You suppose it's efficient; you don't hate it, at any rate. Other recipes feel less like a Muggle recipe and more like something you'd find in a Potions text, down to its strange way of listing ingredients. And unfortunately for you, that holds true for a recipe that not only has been outlined, but marked with a perfectly even little star and a note of _The girls ask for this every Sunday_. Canary pudding. 

And under your grandmother's note, there's your mother's handwriting again. _My favorite! I think Harry will like it too._

You can't help it. You touch the page again, lingering on the blue ink of your mother's words. 

You set your own Sunday aside to bake, though you wisely pick up the ingredients first thing in the morning. Tesco's after 10 AM on a weekend is a madhouse you'd rather skip. Saturday afternoon you spend trying to actually suss out what the amounts in the ingredients list even mean. "The weight of three eggs in sugar and butter, the weight of two eggs in flour," you mutter, nesting three eggs in the metal bowl of your kitchen scale. "But what _size_ eggs, Mrs. Beeton?" The eggs come out to 170g, which means if you want to follow the recipe you'll have to cut your butter into odd-sized pieces until you get the right weight. 

Of course, you could just turn to the Internet, that lovely and horrifying Muggle invention you never got to see as a child. (You were 16 by the time the Dursleys installed a modem at 4 Privet Drive, and you were far more preoccupied with fighting a looming war than the wonders of chatrooms.) In fact, you did look just to compare notes, as it were; the Internet is rife with canary pudding recipes, many of them companion to personal essays on the baker's Nan's wartorn childhood that was only ever brightened by a bit of pudding. You close those tabs. 

It has to be Mrs. Beeton's, which in turn is Mrs. Evans', which in turn is Mrs. Potter's. And now yours. You suspect you're a bit later than your predecessors in inheriting the book, given you're nearly 40 where your mum had you at 20. You've never been one for hitting milestones properly. 

"This whole bloody recipe is a single sentence," you grumble to yourself as you prop the recipe book against the backsplash. "Melt the butter, but do not allow it to oil..." 

What you learn as you prep your ingredients is something you already know—you're not much of a cook. You scrape your knuckles against the grater as you zest the lemon peel, cursing loud enough to fill your empty house, and fail to add the flour in gracefully, dusting your stovetop rather than the pan. You at least manage to remember to whisk the eggs separately, but then you dump the whole mixture in—as instructed, you would protest if anyone asked—and the whole thing turns into sickly-sweet scrambled eggs. Despite your insistence on following Mrs. Beeton's and _only_ Mrs. Beeton's recipe, you search the Internet for clues on where you went wrong, and carefully temper the eggs on your second pass at the pudding. "You tight-lipped old biddy," you tell the book as you dollop batter into the whisked eggs, "you owe me the weight of seven eggs." 

You cheat again when you check whether Mrs. Beeton's assertion that you should boil the whole mixture for two hours is correct, unwilling to risk having to dump out another batch. She's right, as it turns out, but with your limited knowledge you were about to chuck the whole lot straight into a deep stockpot of water. You set the batter in a bowl, then into a pot with an inch of boiling water. 

It isn't until the pudding is boiling away and the counter is cleared that it happens. You don't even realize you're crying until it's in your beard, dripping onto your knuckles where your hands are braced against the edge of the sink. The painful tangle in your throat refuses to be swallowed. "Get on with it," you whisper to yourself, but instead your face floods until it feels every pore burns, the saltwater stinging as it fills the beard Hermione told you to trim. 

You know everything there is to know about the wizarding side of your family—your family tree dates back as far as the twelfth century, rooting itself in a reportedly friendly old wizard named Linfred of Stinchcombe. Everything about the Potter line is documented, important, and the only family history you're meant to care about, but Marion Evans' battered cookery book is all you have to represent your mother's life outside of the wizarding world. 

And you've always known your parents loved you—it was your mother's love for you that saved your life, after all—but after a decade spent under a roof where your only lesson was that you could never be loved, any evidence you can touch is as precious as your next breath. 

Isn't it as important? Aren't your mother's ballpoint thoughts as much a keepsake as any magical item displayed with pride in the Potter vault? Why had no one ever _shown_ you this? 

What would your world have been, if Lily Potter had lived to make canary pudding for her son? What would it have meant to taste your mother's love in a soft yellow cake made with the weight of three eggs in butter and sugar, just as her mother had made for her? 

What would it have been to be loved, without beginning or end? 

The timer spell you set chimes gently; it has been two hours. By then, your tears have finally dried up, and you've made and drunk tea to replenish your dehydrated self. The pudding bowl clinks against the side of the pot as you lift it out, the loudest sound in your lonely house. 

You flip the pudding onto a platter with care, and realize the end of the recipe only instructs you to glaze the thing with "sweet sauce," whatever that means. You navigate back to the table of contents, which leads you to a secondary table of contents for a chapter entitled _FORCEMEATS, GRAVIES, AND SAUCES_ —you can't imagine a less appetizing word than _forcemeat_ at the moment, though you're sure the book will show you one if you look for long enough. It takes you a little more searching online to understand why Mrs. Beeton says you should melt butter that is made with milk, or melt butter with milk, or whatever it is she's trying to tell you, but luckily there are no more measurements by weight of eggs. 

The pudding is finished. Its cheery color seems to brighten the room, but you find yourself without appetite. 

_The girls ask for this every Sunday,_ your grandmother had written, long before she'd ever handed the book down to her younger daughter. 

You wonder what Petunia inherited. 

Privet Drive always looks clean and neat, but the empty houses that dot the neighborhood now give it a desolate feel as well. You Apparate with care, partly to make sure you go unseen by Muggle eyes, mostly to make sure the pudding is safe. Number 4 is a short walk away. 

You heft the pudding on its platter into one arm, raise your other hand to the simple knocker. For a moment, all you can do is hold the metal between your hesitant fingers. 

The door opens, pulling the handle out of your grasp with a small clatter. Aunt Petunia stands behind it, looking tired. The few, brief times you've seen her since Vernon's death—an aneurysm the doctors said was overdue—she has always looked tired. "I saw you come up the drive," she says. 

Your tongue ties itself into sailor's knots, all the meaningful things you thought you might say suddenly lost. Petunia looks down, though, and her eyes soften, her mouth suddenly slack. "Is that—?" she asks. She doesn't point, her hands bundled against her sternum. 

"You asked for it every Sunday," you reply, holding the platter out with a delicate motion. The last thing you need is for all your hard work to fly into the hedge or onto Petunia's dress because of your clumsiness. "Didn't you?" 

She regards the offered pudding with half-lidded eyes, her hands uncurling to reach for it. When you look at those hands, you can still see the frying pan clenched tight in her fist, its interior still sizzling with burning fat, raised to strike you from high above your little head. You feel the ghosts of those palms shoving your skinny body under the stairs before they turn the key that locks you in. The only thing that keeps you from flinching is the pudding's wellbeing. 

"I did," she says at last, as she lifts the platter out of your grip. "We did," she corrects herself. "My sister loved this pudding as much as I did." 

Aunt Petunia brings her gaze up, her eyes watery as she meets yours. 

"Why don't you come inside, Harry?" she says. "We have so much to talk about."

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to crowry for beta reading and for encouraging me to start writing hp fic! 
> 
> the book and its recipes are real: mrs. beeton's cookery book, first published in 1861. here are the recipes harry used:  
> 


End file.
